Periodization has become a bad word in CrossFit Land. My optimistic view on this phenomenon is that it’s due simply to widespread misunderstanding of what exactly periodization is, how variable its implementation can be, and not only its value when used correctly, but its necessity in some form for anyone but the complete beginner. The cynic in me, on the other hand, believes this vehement aversion to periodization of any nature is more a product of frequent bad-mouthing by individuals in positions of authority who fail to grasp the fundamentals and are much more willing to disparage periodization and its proponents and claim a degree of authority so extravagant it exceeds the intellectual capacity of the totality of the world’s coaches and athletes, rather than admit a lack of understanding and spend some time learning from others.

Having said this, I feel a need to clarify that I do believe much periodization is constructed poorly and falls short of its intended goals. This, however, demonstrates an individual’s ineptitude or inexperience, not a fundamental flaw in the concept itself.

Part of the problem is likely due to the association of specific models with periodization itself; that is, too many people believe periodization to be a particular structure, likely one they’ve seen in some internet article (or one of those silly digital journals).

Periodization is simply planning. It’s creating a structure to guide one’s training during a given period of time. It doesn’t necessarily mean a progression from higher volume and lower intensity to lower volume and higher intensity, although this basic trend does have a fair degree of utility. In another sense, periodization is the segmentation of training into blocks of time that allow some degree of emphasis on certain traits over others. The bottom line, the term periodization should be considered synonymous with planning.

Ends & Means

Let me go ahead and distill this entire article to its essence: If you have no plan with regard to your training, you’re an idiot. Abrasive, I know, but this point needs to sink in.

The idea that you can make maximal progress without a plan in any pursuit, whether it’s athletics, business, or space travel, is absurd. Can you make progress without a plan? Sure. You can pretty much guarantee some degree of improvement over a long enough period of time with consistent hard work. But being satisfied with minimal progress when greater progress is entirely achievable is just stupid.

Does this mean everyone needs to know exactly what they’ll be doing every day for the next twelve months? Of course not. Planning comes in many different forms and degrees of precision, and those characteristics will vary according to individual needs.

We can plan everything from a single workout, to a short series of workouts in a week, to an entire year of training. How detailed each of these plans is will change according to individual need, but planning on all of these levels should exist in some manner. Without it, we’re just crossing our fingers.

Generalization Specifically

So we have this thing called CrossFit. Its intention is to create fitness, which has been defined by Greg Glassman as increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains. That’s fancy-talk for being able to do more shit.

CrossFit is a somewhat nebulous program involving “constantly varied, if not randomized, functional movement performed at high intensity.” This notion of randomness has become an eclipsing focus of many CrossFit athletes and trainers. Quite possibly this is because approaching training randomly effectively masks a lack of programming ability and gives one a false sense of programming expertise. Anyone can throw a list of exercises and numbers on a whiteboard; far fewer can create workouts that, over a given period of time, ensure an athlete accomplishes his or her goals.

An entirely random approach to training, in my humble, lowly, uneducated opinion, is a mistake. Being prepared for any random task is not the same thing as preparing randomly for any task. The importance of this point cannot be overstated.

Being prepared for anything means balancing and improving equally, on average over time, the range of athletic traits. The list created by Jim Cawley of Dynamax is a nice guide: Strength, power, speed, endurance, stamina, flexibility, balance, coordination, agility and accuracy.

This balancing of traits is done by improving one’s weaknesses without sacrificing one’s strengths unnecessarily until every trait is within a reasonable range of equality, at which time elements can be trained in a more balanced fashion (although emphasis of certain elements during certain times will continue to allow greater progress even in a reasonably balanced athlete). How does one improve one’s lacking elements of fitness? By emphasizing those elements in training for given periods of time—not necessarily continuously—until they’re no longer weaknesses. Sound like anything we’ve talked about thus far?

People & Places

We have a few basic kinds of people to consider with regard to all this planning nonsense.

First are individuals who must be as balanced as possible—that is, prepared for any contingency—at all times. This includes military personnel, law enforcement officers, firefighters, EMS personnel and the like whose lives and careers depend on being physically capable of managing extreme physical demands without prior notice. A cop doesn’t have the luxury, for example, of training for a particularly brutal arrest and control situation a given date.

Competitive athletes, on the other hand, do have competition schedules and know when and where they’ll need their particular set of physical traits. Occasionally athletes like fighters will take on last-minute events other than ones for which they’ve been preparing, but this is comparatively uncommon, and for these athletes, whether or not to take a fight is ultimately a choice, not a requirement.

Finally we have the vast majority of the exercising population—individuals who seek fitness for its own sake, for health, for improvement of their chosen recreational activities, and even for the enjoyment of training itself. These individuals have no schedule at all, and no need to be prepared in perfect balance at any given moment (an exception might be an individual planning to do something goofy like hike up a big ass mountain during a family vacation).

The optimist in me believes it should be strikingly obvious that the training needs of these three groups are not the same; the cynic knows that too many of each group have been convinced that they should all be preparing the same way.

Everyone from each of these groups has strengths and weaknesses. Those weaknesses need to be addressed if that individual is to achieve the level of fitness being sought. Again, these things are addressed by emphasizing particular elements—whether specific exercises or entire modalities—in order to bring them up to speed with the remainder of an individual’s abilities.

This need to emphasize certain elements doesn’t change among individuals, irrespective of career, sport, or hairstyle; what changes is the degree to which one can emphasize a given element over others. In other words, the less the demand for constant readiness, the more we can temporarily and slightly compromise certain abilities for the sake of improving those needing the most improvement.

Compromise is for Pussies! (and Married Men)

So why should we compromise any element of fitness at anytime? Because in order to genuinely emphasize one element, we need to create slack elsewhere. There is a very real limit to how much the human body can handle simultaneously, and attempting to perform at 100% across the board at all times is a guaranteed recipe for stagnation if not utter disaster.

Interestingly enough, this notion is often dismissed because emphasis and compromise are mistakenly interpreted as specialization and sacrifice. Again, it’s critical to understand that it’s entirely possible to adjust the degree of emphasis and compromise to be appropriate for any individual in any case.

The fact is that emphasis means greater progress. This cannot be denied without delusion. We can demonstrate this fact by looking to athletic specialists. The strongest athletes in the world, for example, are those who train exclusively for strength and forsake all other elements of fitness that fail to contribute to being stronger in an athlete’s event(s). This fact is known to anyone who considers it for a moment, but is often forgotten when entering into passionate discussions regarding fitness.

This rule of emphasis producing greater results can be applied even when fitness is our goal—again, we just modulate the degree of emphasis to better preserve the de-emphasized elements.

A perfect example of this is Michael Rutherford’s Max Effort Black Box program, which seeks to maintain a rather high level of fitness while emphasizing strength development, and has been very successful with accomplishing this goal. It doesn't sacrifice fitness, and, arguably, improves it by increasing the individual’s strength, which appears overwhelmingly to be the trait most lacking in CrossFitters. The athlete’s performance on longer-duration metabolic workouts may suffer somewhat, but ultimately, such workouts are less builders of fitness than tests of it, and to a large degree, tests of mental fortitude more than physical ability.

The degree of emphasis in a program is commensurate to the degree of compromise. In other words, with more compromise, we can achieve greater improvement in the trait being emphasized (this is not to say that we necessarily need to emphasize/compromise to a great degree in all cases). This rule is important to keep in mind when creating programs to ensure one doesn’t mistakenly expect to be able to emphasize to an extent beyond what is allowed by the associated compromise.

Everybody’s Doing It

The funny thing (maybe not funny—more exasperating, I suppose) is that nearly every CrossFitter does in fact plan and emphasize certain elements to some extent, knowingly or not (the only ones who don’t are the same folks who flail around helplessly in the rest of their lives as well). Every CrossFitter knows what he or she sucks at most—and, thankfully, sucking at exercise-related things is discouraged in the CrossFit community (although sucking seems to be quite popular…).

I can’t do a muscle-up yet and I feel like a tool! I’m going to drop in more ring dips and false-grip ring pull-ups so I can get one. That sounds suspiciously like emphasis and planning.

So it’s being done already—the problem is that it’s typically not being done well (it’s hard to do something well when you either don’t know you’re doing it or refuse to admit you’re doing it). If more people would acknowledge the need to focus on improving their weaknesses, and learn better ways of training to specifically improve them, we’d find not more specialized athletes, but more balanced CrossFitters.

I am a Specialist. At Everything.

Planning is really not that complicated: Determine a goal and decide on a method of achieving it. The key with goal-setting is being reasonable: don’t be the guy who makes a goal of adding 50 kg to his back squat in four weeks. It’s far more productive to continually make more modest goals, and to continually achieve them on a more frequent basis. This regular accomplishment of goals also keeps the athlete motivated and training hard and consistently, rather than frustrated and training half-heartedly and sporadically.

The generalist will need to have more conservative long-term goals than the specialist, but often short-term goals for generalists can be more ambitious than their specialist counterparts’ because those specialists will be far more advanced in their development. In any case, goals need to be limited in number during any given period—the classic rookie mistake is trying to do everything at the same time to the same degree (Sound like anyone you know?).

This is where creating periods of time to focus on different goals comes into play. If we have a CrossFitter who wants to snatch bodyweight, but also wants to be able to add three more rounds to his Cindy, we have two goals that are not remarkably complementary. This athlete is going to get a lot more accomplished if he or she spends some time improving his or her snatch technique and snatch-related strength while preserving metabolic conditioning as well as possible, and then spending some time improving Cindy-specific stamina while preserving his or her new-found snatching ability, than trying to do both together.

This reality is often dismissed with anecdotes of CrossFitters who added 7,000 lbs to their deadlifts while losing 350 lbs of pure fat and dropping 5 minutes off their Fran times—all while simply following the crossfit.com WOD. This argument, of course, fails to consider the remarkable capacity for adaption of untrained or deconditioned individuals, and the comparatively limited capacity of individuals with many years of smart training under their belts. If an individual is untrained enough, I can improve his deadlift with nothing more than vigorous nose-picking. The point is, what works for beginners (which is anything at all) doesn’t work for more advanced athletes. The more advanced an athlete is, the closer he or she is to his ultimate capacity, and the more necessary legitimate planning becomes. Again, for demonstration of this, look to athletic specialists.

Plandomization

Part of CrossFit’s effectiveness is the constant variation of the metabolic workouts in terms of exercises, reps, rounds, etc. (as an aside, its biggest weakness is the constant variation and random implementation of strength work).

So how do we reconcile this notion of constant variation with planning for specific goals? Simple: we plan the fundamental structure of our training—the training that is helping us accomplish our current primary goal—and fill in the spaces with more randomized—but smart—training that takes into consideration our secondary goals.

Most often what this will look like (or should look like, considering the current state of CrossFitters at large) is a structured strength program accompanied by CrossFit-style metabolic workouts. These workouts will be varied continually, but they should not be randomly created. At minimum, these workouts should be constructed in a manner than doesn’t interfere with the strength work; ideally, they should be constructed with an effort to work toward accomplishing a secondary goal.

A secondary goal needs to be kept just that—it’s easy to get carried away and attempt to achieve too much at once, which nearly always results in failure across the board. Secondary-goal-oriented programming would be the emphasis of exercises or elements that have proven to be weaknesses for the athlete in question within actual CrossFit workouts. This might look like increased frequency of pull-ups in metCons for individuals whose pull-ups suck, or an increase in box jump height for an athlete who realizes he or she has been sandbagging with little girl boxes and needs to actually put effort into jumping. It may be spending a few more minutes before and after every workout on flexibility and mobility, or taking a little ego hit and performing dumbbell cleans instead of power cleans in order to shore up bottom-position weakness.

In other words, it doesn’t need to involve any kind of extravagant planning—simply being cognizant of minor weaknesses and ensuring such exercises or elements don’t continue to be neglected. As those elements improve sufficiently, we move on to the next crop of weaknesses.

This is exactly how I approach the CrossFit programming at Catalyst Athletics. I can tell you exactly what strength work our CrossFitters will be doing six Tuesdays from now, but I can’t tell you what metCon they’ll be doing that day yet. I plan seven-week strength cycles, but I plan each week’s metCons the week prior. When creating these metCons, I consider the strength workout on the same day and the rest of the week, the other metCons that week, and the metCons from prior weeks, along with the weaknesses and strengths I see in our clients. Based on this information, I have goals for them, both short- and long-term, and I create workouts and workout series to accomplish these goals. In other words, while the metCons are constantly varied, they’re by no means random.

Work on It

This article is more of an attempt to motivate smarter programming by CrossFit athletes and trainers than to provide actual guidance for such programming. Guidance of that nature requires far more information than can be contained in an article like this—it requires active pursuit of pertinent information, experimentation, and discussion with other professionals.

If you believe you know all there is to know about programming, you haven’t done your homework. There is always more information out there, and there will always be someone who knows something you don’t. Learn to be unsatisfied with your current abilities.

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Great article Greg....can you suggest any books related to strength periodization?

Jared

2009-04-29

Your articles are always informative but it's the cynic inyou that makes them so much fun to read. Wish I was closer so I could train at Catylist. Keep on writing.

Gant

2009-04-30

I'm happy to see this expressed in words. I'm sad that this isn't common sense.

Jake

2009-05-01

This might be the single best/most useful crossfit oriented article I've read...and i'm a pretty big mainsite crossfit nerd. I'm a firefighter with an exercise physiology background who trains for a specific aerobic event each spring, and a specific anaerobic event each summer/fall. "Plandomization" is essentially what I've been trying to implement in my own training, and what I've been trying to articulate to my nucklehead freinds for a year or so now. Thanks for putting it in writing.

Great article! I've been tinkering around with the idea of randomizing (really randomizing, not just variation or intuitive training or "whatever Coach wants to do today") workouts yet being able to change the parameters of the randomization for a few years, and put up http://www.statisticool.com/weightedexercise.htm a while ago. Randomization is important, but the parameters can (and should be) altered to account for an individual situation and goals. Like Everett says, smart randomization.

Justin
http://www.statisticool.com

KCFB

2009-05-02

Not much to add content wise, but wanted to say I think this is one of the best clear-eyed examinations of the crossfit model I've read. Thanks.

Hank

2009-05-02

An excellent article. Thanks for sharing it publicly for free.

I find Glassman's work-capacity model of fitness and health interesting and reasonable. But where is the *evidence* that following Crossfit programming improves work capacity?

My own experience -- which apparently is similar to the experiences of many others -- is that improving strength is paramount to improving work-capacity. Certainly on non-endurance tasks.

I suspect Rutherford's ME Black Box program would create better Crossfitter's than Crossfit's main page workouts of the day. My own programming goes something like this:

I rotate through the four workouts, taking days off whenever I feel I need them, and I add short metcons to three out of four workouts on average. I choose metcons that compliment the day, or sometimes even replace some of the light work. (E.g., Tabata front-squats in place of the 1x20 squats on Day 3.) At least one a week, I skip the gym and go for a three to eight mile run.

My Crossfit benchmark workout times have improved tremendously. I've made far more progress following this strength-biased approach than following the Crossfit mainpage workouts.

Rob McBee - Crossfit Camas

2009-05-02

Thanks Greg for this article and to all the contributing authors in this months Performance Menu. From the badass cover shot to Scotty's recipes this issue was informative, provocative, and essential, IMO.

As much as it might seem that periodization is eschewed in Crossfit circles in favor of blindly following the 'varied if not random' mantra, it was still Coach Glassman's insights that help start me thinking of how to best structure Crossfit training:

"There is plenty of time within an hour session to warm up, practice a basic
movement or skill or pursue a new PR or max lift, discuss and critique the
athletes’ efforts, and then pound out a tight little couplet or triplet utilizing these
skills or just play." -Glassman, Virtuosity in Fundamentals

Good stuff but how would that program actually look? I think Coach Rut's MEBB specifically puts the above quote into highly effective practice. Huge thanks and respect to Coach Rut for sharing the details of the MEBB via the PM all these years. Rut's blog "The Fitness Conduit" is awesome and you get to see how the master implements the approach daily.

I would also recommend a read/re-read of the CF Journal article "Dissecting the Fish: Plotting Progress in Multi-Mode Training" by Lon Kilgore.

With all the excellent coaches/trainers doing great programming in their gyms I don't doubt there is the other extreme that don't really lift and simply metcon all the time. The take-away I got from this months PM is "don't be that guy". Thanks again.

John

2009-05-02

Thanks for a great article. I particularly like this line: "Being prepared for any random task is not the same thing as preparing randomly for any task." After doing only Crossfit for a couple of months the way I felt was that Crossfit workouts are a great way to demonstrate well-rounded fitness but not necessarily the best way to achieve it.

Allen Y

2009-05-03

Good stuff.

Scott Dyck

2009-05-04

Well said.

SteveL

2009-05-05

Excellent.

K Newman

2009-05-08

I wish I had read this last week. A few days ago I was trying to explain to a fellow CF'er how I was forgoing some of the metcon workouts to focus on Oly lifts for competition. I was having trouble trying to make the case of "you just can't have everything" and this article is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

Tom Woodward

2009-05-08

Really great piece Greg.

"Part of CrossFit’s effectiveness is the constant variation of the metabolic workouts in terms of exercises, reps, rounds, etc. (as an aside, its biggest weakness is the constant variation and random implementation of strength work). "

That is very well said. Based on recent developments in the community (Gant's Hybrid, CF Strength Bias, CrossFit Football), the idea of structured strength followed by constantly varied short met cons seems to be the new model.

adam

2009-05-09

this is killer.

M Kerr

2009-05-14

Greg,
Nicely put. I made a few of those mistakes recently in my own programming. Love the writing styles in your articles. It mirrors the conversations we have in our gym before training sessions. Keep up the good work.

Erik

2009-07-07

Bitchin Article. You, along with Dutch Lowy, Mike Rutherford, Mark Rippetoe, Jeff Martin, and others are comprising what I deem the "New School" of CrossFit. The Black Box is no longer translucent...

John

2010-07-09

Spot on. No wonder you lost your affiliate status.

Jared #2

2011-12-15

@John
Hahaha

steve loeding

2012-02-20

Thank you for another fantastic and informative work.

Chris Saliba

2013-06-29

I have read this article several times in the last few years and it is pure gold. Thanks for your contribution.

Norm

2014-03-26

This was all true then (2009), is true now, and was true eons before. Now, in 2014 within the context of CrossFitters, the top competitive exercisers since 2009 obviously employ this on many levels (and most likely as former athletes prior to their CF athletedom) in order to be at the top of this 'sport'.

Jory Malone

2014-03-26

Excellent article with a lot of great points. I think the popularity of this romanticized style of training versus scientific logic plays along with societies' ever diminishing attention span and mental laziness, for lack of a better analogy. In reality, people are overwhelmed by the science of periodization (mostly due to the lack of education and investment in sport's science in the western society amongst other failures) and don't want to have to plan or put too much thought or study into anything. That would require quite a bit of reflection of strengths, weaknesses, goals, the addition of quite a bit of knowledge and study of how to make a plan (i.e. time) and a coach. So this whole marketing story of "we're training for chaos" or the real world is a justification to their psyche, even though it defies logic as you pointed out in many of your points. I guess it adds weight to the theory that people are much more driven by emotion than logic and reason. And after all, they already have a demanding job, kids doing soccer, etc... and they're training to be Leonidas or at least look like him, not some Olympic Champion. I mean who wants to be one of those narrow specialized highly successful sport's champions when you can do a lot of stuff instead and just suck at all of it. Sounds like a lot less pressure to me, plus Leonidas would be all the envy of the little league parents. Then there's the mediocracy of, "I'm just doing this to stay in shape and be healthy". That's great except the randomized training session could be perfect for one individual's long term health but break another individual literally in two. That'd be real healthy. Why don't we just get rid of doctors and all get on the same health plan and medications? That'd really simplify things and take a load off too. Overall this movement is a great marketing campaign, by a marketer not a coach. It's had some positive impacts like introducing people to Olympic weightlifting and gymnastics, but it's also spread some serious disinformation with a league of religious followers chanting it's tenants.

Tom Johnson

2014-03-30

Greg, any suggestions on competent crossfit programming to follow?

Greg Everett

2014-03-31

Tom Johnson -
OPT.

Juan Valentin

2015-08-08

As both a certified personal trainer and a crossfit trainer, I see the point and value of this article. I must say that in gym, studios and boxes, I consistently see folks (trainers and clients) who "outsource" thinking; particularly, fitness planning towards goal achievent.

Crossfit methodology revolves around making athletes performance more efficient, what I'd does not promise is that if you do crossfit alone, you'll be a better marathoner, triathlete, ect.. it also doesn't promise that without proper planning and self discipline in training, nutrition, rest, ect..).

I've been to a lot of Crossfit boxes and yet haven't found one that completely pulls programming out of thin air. Usually, the head coach data captures the output of athlete performance (either off the board or some WOD log program) to determine the programming approach he should take to enhance the performance of his athletes. I believe that addresses programming as you mentioned in the Article.

Please continue to put great articles to better all of the fitness community!